Plateaued health metrics

[mtbc]

Last year it did not take me enormous effort to see a gradual improvement in my exercise performance. This year, the overall trend line has been decidedly flat, a little lower than where I had hoped to settle. I have been using the cross-trainer for forty minutes four times per week and have not felt as if I were taking it easy. I need willpower for other things in my life too so I do not want to push my workouts in a way that makes them more unappealing: then I may not keep doing them at all.

What I shall try for coming weeks is being easygoing about my average power output, so as to remove some stress from the workouts, but to work out for a bit longer and at a gently increasing average resistance level, my previous resistance level becoming a decreasingly long warm-up. Perhaps I have a tendency toward keeping the RPM in the 50's that means that I will find that my average power settles a little higher than I have managed so far. I shall consider myself to be working hard enough if I am remembering to work my arms as well as my legs and I do not feel as if I have breath to spare.

My weight is still in the official healthy band but also still near the top. I estimate that I am eating little enough that it ought still be drifting downward though at a shallow enough rate that the usual apparently random variations may be clouding that trend. I shall continue to eat as I am for another month before making any changes to my diet so that I have more confident data on the effect of my current regime.

Comments

[goldibehr]

It's good that you can motivate yourself to exercise. We have a nice Elliptical Machine in the basement, but neither of us has used it in quite a while. The longest interval I sustained was for about 2 months, 3 sessions per week.

[mtbc]

I wish you luck in returning to it, or to something else more appealing, someday. In the basement is exactly the kind I'd be tempted to put a television in front of.

I don't know why I can motivate myself to exercise at the moment. It certainly doesn't come naturally and it would be easy for me to tell myself I should be doing something else instead. In school I was one of those kids who was picked last (actually, third-last) when teams were being picked in gym class. I have gone for years at a time being quite unfit and knowing that was bad, even at times while mst3kmoxie was both living with me and exercising frequently. Whatever changed with me, I hope it continues to stick.